Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism

6: Oyotunji African Village: A Diaspora Experiment in African Nationhood

167 CHAPTER SIX Oyotunji African Village A Diaspora Experiment in African Nationhood •• Here in America we have been briefly conquered by European culture , but we are Africans nonetheless. —Oba Oseijeman Adefunmi I Oyotunji african village is a twenty-seven-acre diaspora interpretation of Africa in North America. The physical road to Oyotunji leads travelers down 95 South from Charleston to local Highway 17, running through South Carolina’s scenic low country. From the town of Sheldon, South Carolina, a narrow dirt road twists and turns to the entrance of Oyotunji. Wooden signs nailed to trees along the road indicate to firsttime visitors that they are drawing nearer to America’s African Village. At the entrance to Oyotunji African Village, travelers behold a new material, aesthetic, and visual culture based on “traditional Yoruba prototypes from Nigeria and Benin Republic.”1 A deliberate indicator of “boundary maintenance ” demarcates the physical and spiritual boundaries of Oyotunji African Village from the broader American world:2 chapter six 168 You are leaving the U.S. You are entering the Yoruba Kingdom. In the name of His Highness Efuntola, peace[. W]elcome to the sacred Yoruba Village of Oyotunji. The only village in North America built by priests of the Vodun cults as a tribute to our ancestors. These priests preserve the customs, laws and religion of the African race[.] Welcome to our land! Entering the African world of Oyotunji, you are placed, as one visitor stated, “in another context altogether.”3 The figurative transition from the United States to an African village in North America immediately manifests itself as visitors encounter the shrine of the Yoruba deity, Esu-Elegba. Esu is one of the many public shrines in Oyotunji Village constructed on “artistic epistemologies” of West Africa.4 Esu-Elegba is the divine trickster in the Yoruba pantheon who stands at the crossroads and mediates between the mundane world and the world of spirit. At Oyotunji African Village, Esu-Elegba stands at the crossroads, symbolically mediating between a contested world of North America and a conceptual world of Africa. figure 12. Welcome sign written in Yoruba and English demarcating the borders between the United States and Oyotunji African Village. Photograph courtesy of author. Oyotunji African Village 169 Oyotunji African Village exists today as evidence of an alternative community of African American nationalists seeking over four decades ago to express their religious and cultural interpretations of Yoruba society. They constructed an African-style village to summon Africa to them in their diaspora environs. Adefunmi and the residents of Oyotunji combined the historical and racial complexities of their lived American experience with their knowledge of Africa to create a “new Yorubaland” in the low country of South Carolina. They sought to promote a new “sacred nationality ” among African Americans in the United States.5 According to Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara, “Oyo Tunji testifies to the agency and activity of African Americans in the diaspora,”6 and in Oyotunji this agency has concentrated on the “creation of African American males and females in the Yoruba likeness.”7 figure 13. Shrine of Esu-Elegba, the orisa of the crossroads, at the entrance of Oyotunji African Village. Photograph courtesy of author. chapter six 170 In theory, Oyotunji African Village is an experiment in the “historical ontology of the present.”8 It is a space that envisages living out of an ontological reality rooted in history and antiquity while negotiating a lived identity in the present. Oyotunji Village navigates a cultural and religious epistemology that takes a “backward glance”9 in “redeploy[ing] certain indigenous idioms”10 of a Yoruba past while at the same time charting a relevant present and future. It conveys a time-origin-space paradigm that is motivated by pre-Atlantic moments rooted in Africa and culturally executed in North America. Africa firmly rests at the center of Oyotunji’s philosophies , cultivating what Kim D. Butler calls an “oppositional identity” in a Western Hemisphere of symbolic exile.11 According to its founder, Oba Efuntola Oseijeman Adelabu Adefunmi I, Oyotunji Village stands as a “tiny Yoruba enclave,”12 a “full life-style alternative” struggling to survive in twenty-first-century North America.13 Its founder envisioned Oyotunji African Village in South Carolina “as a monument to their Africa[n] past.”14 It does not pretend to be an exact replication of a village in West Africa but instead is a religious and cultural redaction or “rearticulation...